New Orleans, LA [14 March 2011] — The Ken Kirschman Artspace and the NOCCA Institute are proud to celebrate the New Orleans Photo Alliance’s 7th Annual PhotoNOLA Festival with an exhibition of new work by Frank Hamrick and Steve Pyke. PhotoNOLA is an annual festival of photography in New Orleans, coordinated by the New Orleans Photo Alliance in partnership with galleries, museums and photographers citywide. The opening reception for this show will be Thursday, November 8, 6 to 8 pm, and the exhibition continues through December 14, 2012. The Ken Kirschman Artspace is located on NOCCA’s campus at 2800 Chartres St., New Orleans, LA. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 am to 1 pm, and Saturday, 12 to 4 pm. Admission is free.

-Bios-

Frank Hamrick

Frank Hamrick is the head of the photography program at Louisiana Tech University. His work mixes photography, storytelling, handmade books and found objects. Frank received his BFA from The University of Georgia and his MFA from New Mexico State University. NPR has written about Frank’s handmade books and Oxford American magazine recently listed Frank as one of the 100 Superstars of Southern Art. His work is housed in collections including the Georgia Museum of Art and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

Steve Pyke

Steve Pyke was born in Leicester, an industrial manufacturing town in the Midlands of England. He left school at 16 and worked in the local textile industry as a factory mechanic. Pyke became involved in the turbulent music scene of the mid/late 1970’s, a move which ultimately led him into his first experiments in photography. He purchased a Rolleiflex camera, and in 1980 started to photograph portraits in a distinctive and close style. Throughout his career, Steve Pyke has developed, funded, and then published a number of personal projects which have given his work shape and thrust. Best known perhaps are those on the world’s leading thinkers—Philosophers—and on youth identity as expressed through Uniforms. Like August Sander, Pyke is fascinated by collecting the Faces of Our Times, and has made a touching series on First War veterans as well as a major study of the leading Film Directors. Confounding those who would define him simply as a portraitist, he has produced fascinating still-life projects, exciting experiments in collage and multiple imagery, a profound body of humanist street photography, and powerful landscape work.